Welcome to Ask the CEO, in which chief executives take time out from running companies to solve your career problems.

Kevin Hartz, 45 years old, is the CEO of Eventbrite, an online ticketing service headquartered in San Francisco. He co-founded the company with two partners – one of which is his wife, Julia – in 2006. Prior to that, he founded a digital money transfer company.

Q: How do I know when it’s time to leave my job to pursue a side project?

You don’t have to jump out and make an all-or-none binary decision. You can work on the side and see if it works. Silicon Valley has been started by all these moonlighting side projects — somebody bored inside of a company has seen a way to do something differently or has been rejected to work on it internally so starts moonlighting, and it develops into something great. That’s been a lot of the evolution of Silicon Valley and the broader tech market around the world.